Above: mezzo-soprano Isabel Leonard and conductor Kevin John Edusei performing Berlioz with the New York Philharmonic; photo by Chris Lee
Author: Lane Raffaldini Rubin
Thursday January 2nd, 2025 - The New York Philharmonic enters 2025 amid its multi-season music director interregnum. Jaap van Sweden left the Philharmonic at the end of the 2023-24 season and Gustavo Dudamel won’t officially arrive until the beginning of the 2026-27 season. In the meantime, audiences at the Philharmonic come along for the ride of seeing and hearing as many conductors as possible— including quite a few unfamiliar ones.
This week, German conductor Kevin John Edusei, a veteran opera conductor and the former Chief Conductor of the Munich Symphony Orchestra, made his Philharmonic debut in a program featuring Hector Berlioz’s Les nuits d’été and Richard Strauss’s Also sprach Zarathustra.
The program opened with Elysium, a twelve-minute symphonic poem by the 40-year-old Canadian composer Samy Moussa. The piece begins with a bright, expansive b-flat-major sustained in the orchestra. It promptly shifts to minor before sliding up and down to other chords and oscillating between their majors and minors. This oscillation—which has the same effect as a sunny sky darkened by a cloud and brightened again once the cloud passes—serves as the main musical motive that drives the piece. The Philharmonic generously treated this music with a rich, sonorous, even mammoth sound.
But the music never strays from its cloying “pearly gates” tonality. Moussa relies on facile and unimaginative use of big major and minor chords up and down the score. The result is an over-saturated sameness that fails to produce tension or drama. Similarly, the orchestration usually employs the entire ensemble. The handful of moments that feature smaller sections within the orchestra are exceedingly brief, reverting almost immediately to music for the full orchestra.
A battery of percussion (nearly always supplemented by the piccolo) does little to enliven the texture. The woodwinds and strings pass Baroque-style basso continuo figures (made up mostly of stepwise lines) among them without driving the harmonic motion of the music. The string writing is further wrapped up in throwaway kitchen-sink antics like glissandi (sliding pitches up and down) and col legno (hitting the strings with the wood of the bow). Moussa passes all of this off as Brucknerian “symphonism”.
The worst offense is the confession in the program notes that Moussa chose the title of the work after the piece was written. The notes continue paradoxically to describe Moussa’s interest in the vision of Elysium elaborated by the pre-Socratic philosopher Empedocles and go so far as to explain Moussa’s ethical view of the subject matter.
But a listener searching for the paradisical, the pastoral, the ethereal, or the eternal would only find those qualities accidentally in this shiny music. This is musical pedantry at its most disingenuous. A piece written without a program should be presented as such—as absolute music. A piece entitled Symphonic Poem (2021) would be a more honest statement to present to audiences than an Elysium that has nothing to do with the Elysian Fields.
The Philharmonic was then joined by the celebrated mezzo-soprano Isabel Leonard for Hector Berlioz’s song cycle Les nuits d’été. This music, originally written in 1841 for vocalist and piano accompaniment and orchestrated over the following fifteen years, is a setting of six poems by Théophile Gautier on themes of love and loss.
Leonard’s singing was introspective, modest, sincere, and effortless. Les nuits d’été is not a virtuosic showpiece but rather an intimate sharing of emotions—most of them melancholy in nature. The “Villanelle” was rustically simple and unfussed. In “Le spectre de la rose” (the highpoint of the cycle), “Sur les lagunes: Lamento”, and “Absence” Leonard’s warm and piercing sound shone through, especially in the lower half of her tessitura where it communicated the alternating sweetness and bitter sadness of Gautier’s text.
The beginning of the cycle seemed to get off on the wrong foot for Edusei, who struggled consistently through the “Villanelle” to manage transitional moments and minor rubato liberties taken by Leonard. Even into “Spectre” there seemed to be a distance between the soloist and the orchestra in both time and timbre. By the fourth song, “Absence”, however, Leonard and the Philharmonic had found a solid dialogue.
Richard Strauss’s epic tone poem Also sprach Zarathustra of 1896 rounded out the program. A conceptual link can be drawn between Strauss’s piece and Moussa’s post hoc program regarding man’s philosophical journey to understand the universe. Strauss, unlike Moussa, used Nietzsche’s text to structure the piece and construct a distinct sound-world out of the multiform ideas and narratives that it puts forward.
The opening section of the piece, "Sonnenaufgang" (sunrise), famously used in Stanley Kubrick’s film 2001: A Space Odyssey, always runs the risk of garnering chuckles from audience members. Edusei attempted to inject freshness into this material by playing it quickly and without extended fermatas. This was an interesting experiment but made the subsequent chamber-like music in the strings seem to appear out of the blue.
Throughout the piece, Edusei repeatedly downplayed transitional moments which, in lush Romantic music like this, traditionally tempt conductors to indulge in excess. The effect, however, is one of haste rather than directness and resulted in harried playing by the Philharmonic. Edusei pressed briskly ahead through the extended violin solo, eked out admirably by concertmaster Frank Huang. Exquisite solo passages by Anthony McGill (clarinet), Carter Brey (violoncello), and Ryan Roberts (English horn) deserved more breathing room as well. Many other timbral effects did not manage to pop off as they should have—a shame for Strauss’s painterly, well-crafted score.
High-Romanticism like Also sprach Zarathustra is not rewarded by overly fast tempos and undercooked transitions — its dramatic contours rely on interpretive emphasis in order to shine through. What might have been a desire to let the music speak for itself ultimately prevented it from speaking fully. Edusei made his case on the Philharmonic podium for what this music should say, and it ultimately did not say enough.
~ Lane Raffaldini Rubin